


if you want to sing out

by Siria



Category: Bourne Legacy (2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-24
Updated: 2012-12-24
Packaged: 2017-11-22 05:53:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/606506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aaron and words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if you want to sing out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eleanor_lavish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleanor_lavish/gifts).



> A Yuletide Treat! Grateful thanks to my beta, trinityofone.

Before they started him on the initial round of medications and injections, the doctors had told Kenneth that there was a physiological baseline which all Outcome participants tended to reach, but that as the viral load mapped itself onto his own unique neural pathways and was shaped in turn by the individual quirks of his genetic code, he would likely express particular aptitudes and strengths. They'd swabbed the crook of his elbow with alcohol and told him that all the idiosyncrasies couldn't be predicted in advance, and that he should be aware that there was a chance of adverse side effects.

Kenneth hadn't understood a goddamn word of what they'd just said, but Aaron remembered smiling and nodding, and, well, Treadstone's standard for informed consent had always been a little bit quirky. 

The meds had sparked off a fever, his body working to reject something it didn't understand one bit but which it instinctively knew was alien. There was no part of him that remembered much about that first week beyond how he'd shivered his way through it; how every bone in his body felt as if it had been hollowed out, the marrow replaced by hot, dense lead. One thing, however, he did recall with clarity: two pairs of hands moving him from side to side as sweat-drenched bed linens were replaced. 

"You hear what the boss went with in the end?"

"For his name?"

"Yeah. Aaron."

"He on a biblical kick this week or something?"

"No, no, get this—apparently in Hebrew it means _enlightened_."

The sound of their laughter haunted Aaron all through the rest of his fever-dreams. 

Kenneth had struggled with the mysteries of chapter books, but Aaron—Aaron could comprehend tactical reports and weapons manuals and speed-read his way through thick paperback novels. The first volume of poetry he'd read had left him stunned, near breathless at the realisation that there could be songs without music. He learned dozens of new words, hundreds, gulping them down with a voracity that would have scared him if not for the fact that he spent most of the time practically shitting himself anyway. Aaron didn't know if all of this really was down to a random kink in his DNA, or if some deity had cranked the irony meter all the way to eleven; if the doctors knew, they didn't care to explain it, just made notes on their clipboards, peered at him like he was a dog that'd just performed a particularly interesting trick, and told his handlers that he was well-suited for accelerated foreign language training and overseas postings. 

Aaron learned Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Urdu—the essential languages for his purposes, given the CIA's geographical interests. His instructors focused on getting to him a level of basic competence: grammar drills, accents and intonation, the kinds of vocabulary he'd most likely need. There was no expectation that he'd want anything more than that. An interest in reading academic-level texts wasn't exactly encouraged for field operatives, and after all if Aaron were ever in a situation where he was required to have an in-depth conversation with a local who wasn't a contact, it would most likely be because his cover had been blown and he was fucked anyway. 

Still, there was nothing in the regs that said he had to sit idly sweltering in a shitty hotel room waiting for a target to show up, and a couple of rupees would buy him a cheap paperback copy of _The Portable Beat Reader_ or a Dickens novel. In Bogotá, he waited out an October rainstorm reading a dog-eared copy of _Veinte poemas de amor_ , lips moving to shape new words or to tame the way the Spanish syntax twisted across the page in ways so unfamiliar that for a moment he was terrified that he was reverting back into Kenneth. 

When you got to studying how words worked on the page, it got easier to figure out how the conversations around you worked, too. Phrase your questions just so, smile Kenneth's guileless smile when someone unconsciously let something slip, and pretty soon you had a little mental cache of knowledge and reasonable inferences that'd make Dyer turn green if he ever found out about it. Aaron got to liking his name because yup, there was that irony again. 

"Enlightened," he told his reflection one morning while he was shaving, and then laughed so hard that he ended up with a vicious nick on his cheek. 

There was no time for books during that first headlong rush from one side of the world to the other; hardly any space at all in his head for words when he'd lain in that little room in Manila, the virus building and building in his system until his skull felt fit to burst. They had nothing but time while the boat chugged over calm seas towards Palawan, of course, time enough to read dozens of books—but given the way Marta smiled at him, the look on her face when she told him that she hoped they were lost, Aaron was pretty okay with that.

Besides, there was nothing that said that words, once written, had to stay in books. Aaron could remember great swathes of what he'd read and so after a dinner of pork adobo and rice washed down with lukewarm beer, he provided entertainment through a dramatic rendition of some of Shakespeare's most melodramatic moments. 

Marta cheered and applauded when he was done, but protested that she had nothing to offer in return. "I tested out of Intro to English Lit in college! I spent most of my time memorising the names of enzymes, not—" She stopped, and her smile took on a slightly wicked slant, and said, "Though _actually_ …"

It turned out that Marta knew a whole host of Limericks of such surpassing filthiness that they brought an embarrassed flush to Aaron's cheeks even while he laughed at them. 

By the time the two of them trailed off, yawning as the adrenaline leached from their systems, they were sitting close enough that plausible deniability wasn't an option any more. "Chance of adverse side effects," Aaron said to himself, looking down at her dark head resting against his arm, feeling something strange and fragile turn over in his chest. He'd told her to run and she hadn't.

"Hrm?" Marta mumbled. 

"Nothing," Aaron said. "Sleep." It was okay; he knew now that the words would come.


End file.
